Refugees are in the news. People are pledging to help them any way they can.And UNRWA USA is trying to cynically make money off of the phenomenon - even though the organization does not want a single "refugee" under its mandate to ever move to the US and become a citizen.
The entire point of the protests is to allow refugees to come and live safely in the US. The entire point of UNRWA is to keep Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, not to give them opportunities to become citizens anywhere in the world. UNRWA teaches generations of kids that they will one day "return" and therefore they should not seek better lives elsewhere.
UNRWA calls some 2 million Jordanian citizens "refugees." They aren't.
But UNRWA-USA wants to call them that so they can raise money.
UNRWA calls some 2 million people who actually live in the areas of British Mandate Palestine "refugees" - even though they live in the land they are supposedly refugees from. They aren't refugees.
But UNRWA-USA wants to call them that so they can raise money.
UNRWA claims there are twice the number of Palestinian "refugees" in Lebanon than are actually there. Lebanon discriminates against them and they suffer horribly - but "non-political" UNRWA, not shy about attacking Israel, won't say a negative word against Lebanon. It raises money based on 200,000 phantom "refugees" who are now in Europe or spread through the Arab world.
I have no problem with UNWRA helping Syrian Palestinians with food and shelter, but UNRWA's very existence means that they cannot be taken care of by UNHCR. These real refugees from Syria cannot take advantage of UNHCR's efforts to find homes for the other Syrian refugees.
UNRWA refuses to remove any "refugees" from that status - even if they become citizens elsewhere, even if their great-grandparents weren't born in the area of the Mandate Many are descended from people who were never refugees to begin with, but UNRWA refused to remove them from the rolls even in the 1950s. . There is no cessation clause in UNRWA's rules and regulations. Once a "refugee," your descendants can claim benefits from UNRWA for centuries to come.
This campaign is pure cynicism, and it is immoral in that UNRWA-USA is trying to fool well-meaning people who truly want to help refugees into instead donating to a giant self-perpetuating bureaucracy that wasn't meant to exist past 1951.
If you want to help refugees, give to UNHCR - which actually tries to solve the problem of refugees. Don't give to UNRWA whose existence is based on perpetuating the Palestinian "refugee" problem for generations to come.
And they know that - because the slogan here implies that UNRWA will continue to exist forever, as the number of fake "refugees" increases every year.